Theme Parks & Adrenaline: Stress vs Thrill 7/10: The Curious Clinic

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Episode 7. Theme parts and adrenaline. Stress vs. Thrill. Welcome back. I hope you all learning something during this 10-part summer series. Uh living in Florida, we are the theme capital of the world. I think still. I uh in my head, we are. But if you've ever asked why your stomach drops on a roller coaster, today we're exploring the biology of a thrill. So in medicine, we categorize stress into two buckets distress and eustress. The stress is a chronic bad stress that causes disease. Like stressing over an endless email box or constant stress that you can't manage. Eustress is a good stress, it's a thrill of starting a new business. I love ideas. Or riding a roller coaster. Eustress releases endorphins and trains your nervous system to be resilient. So when we talk about stress or consequence in my sphere, at home I talk about consequences, and consequences are good or they are bad, right? Everything in life, if you make a choice, there is an outcome. So stress is the same way. There's nothing different about that. If you have stressors, some can be good. We need some stress in our life, and some can be bad, right? So the consequence of stress is either disease or improvement, releasing endorphins and other things that help your nervous system and your body. So when we look at also inflammation, inflammation in our body is created locally to bring awareness and repair or resolution to something. And when we have good or lower microdosing of inflammation, that's good. But when it hits a threshold or it gets to be too much, then that is when we have breakdown, breakdown of tissue, breakdown in pain. All of these things happen in the body. So remember, not all things are one way or the other. You have to train your brain to think outside the box. That's why I want you to be curious. That's why I started the Curious Clinic, right? That's why I'm doing a second to fifth grade class on the body this fall and next school year, is because when did we stop thinking? When did we start just going, okay, well, all inflammation is bad, all food is bad, or all inflammation is good, and all food is good. Like, why can't it be both? And what does it do in our body? And that's what I want to talk about today. Adrenaline is not bad. Adrenaline plus cortisol releasing multiple times a day over and over with no reprieve, that is bad. That's what causes the breakdown of tissue, that's what causes the distress. But let's talk about eustress, right? EU stress, you stress. Eustress, what does it do? It releases endorphin, it trains your nervous system to be excited and work and and work properly. These are the things that we get to look at and go, ooh, okay. The good stressors in life, what do they do? Well, they improve our cognition, they improve our muscle distribution in our body, they improve our reflexes, they improve, right? So you look at let's say um an athlete who is in tenth grade. When they just start out in the beginning of a season, they start warming up, they start building muscle memory, and by the end of the season, they might be very proficient at a position they play. They might get faster, they might get stronger, their body is getting used to and becoming resilient and being able to do what you're training it to do. Well, that's kind of like our stress system, right? In good stressors, in combination with our nervous system, guess what happens? Okay, what we do is this. Man, I'm gonna go on a roller coaster, and I'm a kid, and I haven't done roller coasters often. So guess what happens? I get butterflies in my stomach, I get um a whole lot of stuff, right? You might feel like you're gonna throw up, pass out, you get fearful or scared or intense, and then you go, okay, but I'm already on the ride, and everybody else is riding the ride, and you start thinking, like, uh, it's gonna be okay. You're climbing the mountain, you're climbing the mountain, you're strapped in the roller coaster, and here you are at the top, and you're like, and guess what happens? Your first time down a roller coaster, you don't know what to think. You don't know what's gonna happen, you just know it's gonna be fast and fun. That's what people tell you it's gonna be. But in your head, you're like, why did I believe them? What's happening? My body doesn't know, I've never experienced this, and your immune system is preparing for what? Fight or flight. So then it triggers the body to go and get adrenaline. It's a thrill, right? And you're going down and you're like your stomach drops and you're weightless, and everything senses in your body, like, what is this, right? When your internal organs are floating due to weightlessness, this is what makes you feel like your stomach is dropping because you you have an internal cavity, you have these organs that are sitting in some type of fluid. Guess what happens with fluid when you change its position? You change the fluid's position, you can make it suspend in air, essentially. So when you're going down these big hills, that dropping sensation is your internal organ system sensing your and telling your nervous system and then transforming it to your brain, computing it to your brain to go, hey, you're weightless right now. Hey, um, you're floating here right now, and this is what's happening. And it feels like your stomach is dropping because that organ shift it creates pressure on sensors in inside your body. You know, you have different um sensors that trigger um different responses, right? So there's really cool things that happen our body, but so your first time on that roller coaster, guess what happens? You might go, oh my gosh, I never want to do that again. That was the scariest thing ever. You might say, Wow, I didn't die from that. That was so cool. I'm going back, mom, mom, mom, let's go back, let's go back. Let's right, you're five, six, ten, twelve. I don't know how old you were the first time you wrote a roller coaster. But that feeling was like, okay, that was a thrill. That was a good stress. I'm gonna go back on the roller coaster because guess what? I survived, it didn't hurt me, and it was fun. So now you're tying in your feelings. Your body or the autonomic nervous system, your senses said to you, this could be good, this could be bad, and then your experience said it was good. And now you're starting to build that resilience. And when you do this over and over and over with an experience that used to be fear-driven, like this is scary, then you can overcome that. And I want you to take that into other areas of your life, like jumping into I don't know, a new business, or becoming a parent, or you know, the things that you might think are scary, doing something that you've never done. Remember, when you do something that you've never done, there is a type of fear that happens, and that fear can overwhelm you and make you never do it, or you can try and succeed and retrain your nervous system and your brain to understand that this is not as scary as you once thought, that even though you were scared, it is a good stress, it's a you stress. And when you do this in life and you overcome these fears, that's what they talk about, overcoming your fear. When you overcome your fear, you're just necessarily literally just training your brain to have a feeling tied to that experience, other than fear, and that's a training, that's a resilience training. So there you have two for one on that. But theme parks and adrenaline, stress versus thrill, and how that works in our body, oh, it's so amazing. But what if you're a kid or you're an adult and you're at the top of the roller coaster and you're hitting your maximum potential energy? What if you're so scared that you can't even continue? Obviously, the roller coaster is gonna continue, but say you're having a nervous breakdown or a fear moment where you just can't overcome it. That's where you can learn, like box breathing, or um training your brain to think about something else, or telling yourself, like good speak, you know, like so. Box breathing is where you inhale, count a four, four seconds, hold it for four seconds, exhale four seconds, hold for four seconds, and repeat. When you're brain training, you can also be like, Okay, at the bottom, this is gonna happen. That I was told this is gonna happen, I was told this is gonna, and you can start talking yourself to like, no, this is a good thing. Like, you know, our body experiences, I think it was um fear and joy, or fear and happiness is the same neurotransmitter. I'll have to look that up to confirm, but it is only the feeling that causes the difference. So that tells you a little hack. You're experiencing something, a neurotransmitter fire or you know, goes down and triggers and goes to the synapse, and all this stuff happens. The only difference between fear and joy, let's use those two, is your feeling. And your feeling is your experience to it or your preconceived notion to it. So if you can change your feeling to it, you can change the outcome of how you feel, which is a great tool. So you can either do that or you can think about something else. Like you're at the top of the roller coaster and that's the only part that scares you. What do you do? You can sing a song, you can think about, oh, what other rides do I want to go on today? Or hey, what are we gonna have for lunch? So you can trick your brain to doing that. But think about all the things that we talked about today and start applying them to different areas of your life, not just going on a ride. Curious fact when you drop on a coaster, your stomach drops because your internal organs are floating due to weightlessness. So remember that fun fact. So, what other things can make your stomach drop? You know, maybe turbulence when you're on an airplane, maybe you know, jumping on a trampoline. I don't know how high you can get on that. But that you know, going on an elevator, these things are triggering different responses in the body due to the position or the change in position that we experience. How cool is that? So learn to enjoy the you stress, right? It's a good stress. Manage the distress, the bad stress, and stay curious. And I can't wait to have you on listen to our next episode, episode eight, summer reading and cognitive fitness.